Airfoil Selection and Wingsail Design for an Autonomous Sailboat

Part of the Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing book series (AISC, volume 1092)Ocean exploration and monitoring with autonomous platforms can provide researchers and decision makers with valuable data, trends and insights into the largest ecosystem on Earth. Regardless of the recognition of the importance of such platforms in this scenario, their design and development remains an open challenge. In particular, energy efficiency, control and robustness are major concerns with implications in terms of autonomy and sustainability. Wingsails allow autonomous boats to navigate with increased autonomy, due to lower power consumption, and greater robustness, due to simpler control. Within the scope of a project that addresses the design, development and deployment of a rigid wing autonomous sailboat to perform long term missions in the ocean, this paper summarises the general principles for airfoil selection and wingsail design in robotic sailing, and are given some insights on how these aspects influence the autonomous sailboat being developed by the authors.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Hedonic Quality or Reward? A Study of Basic Pleasure in Homeostasis and Decision Making of a Motivated Autonomous Robot

© The Author (s) 2016. Published by SAGE. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).We present a robot architecture and experiments to investigate some of the roles that pleasure plays in the decision making (action selection) process of an autonomous robot that must survive in its environment. We have conducted three sets of experiments to assess the effect of different types of pleasure---related versus unrelated to the satisfaction of physiological needs---under different environmental circumstances. Our results indicate that pleasure, including pleasure unrelated to need satisfaction, has value for homeostatic management in terms of improved viability and increased flexibility in adaptive behavior.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio